If Russia attacks Ukraine, you don't say as a Bible believer, ‘Oh, it just happened. It was the autonomous wickedness of Russia that did this.’ No, God has allowed it. ‘Why would God have allowed it?’, we ask. ‘It will result in awful suffering. Why?’ Well we remember first of all, that this would be the constant state of the world until it burned itself out in terror, if God did not restrain it. But you think of the atheistic West, the atheistic world indeed, and it scorns revelation, the biblical explanation of man, the fall of man. Absurd, ridiculous! The depravity of man. So the world, the atheistic world, proudly teaches the opposite. Absurd, ridiculous! No, mankind was once amoral, then it advanced and we are now immoral, but we are advancing and we shall ultimately be moral. Well, at least that sort of nonsense was very popular at the beginning of the 20th century. The First World War broke out, and many thinkers who believed that man is good at heart; there is no such thing as depravity; there is no original sin; this biblical nonsense, we want to get rid of it; this is a noble race – many of them were shattered; their philosophy fell to bits. And World War II did for another batch too. But now we have got people strutting about, our political leaders, and they are all convinced about the essential goodness of man. It should not enormously surprise us that God should take off his hand of control so near to the Western world, so that there is a display of the depravity and the cruel potential of man, to shake the confidence of man, and shake the ideas of an atheistic world. A pandemic can't do it. It doesn't look as though a war is going to do it exactly either. So therefore is God ineffective in his measures? No, but he is demonstrating to us the obdurate nature of mankind. When he forms his anti-biblical philosophies and he shakes the fist at God, nothing will persuade him otherwise: not a judgment, not a warning, not a war, not a display of wickedness. He is so proud and fixed in his conceit and self-belief. But it just gives us a glimpse. And of course we pray for people touched and affected by war, and we pray very much for Christians. But ultimately in the strange working of God's providence, all this will be ultimately for the benefit of the church of Jesus Christ in some way, perhaps not seen by us as yet. That is the meaning of these mysterious visions in Zechariah. So there are the four chariots, the messengers carrying out the purposes of God, and the two mountains of his providence, the divine decrees.